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A Fistful of Tropes
- pavlov 3y ago> “Note that I'm allergic to kitsch Americana, especially Westerns, am a singularity skeptic and atheist in real life, expect FTL travel and/or time travel to prove impossible, ditto mind uploading and "true" general artificial intelligence, and strongly suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox is that our kind of tool-using intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the cosmos. Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization. I'll play with these as fictional tropes, but only in storytelling mode, not predictive mode.” Since he’s the Antipope, does this mean Elon Musk is the Pope? Loves kitsch Americana, manifest destiny space colonization, and generally bullish on all these tropes…
- lacrimacida 3y agoI’m not sure but Musk is certainly trying hard to be the Pope of something, not exactly sure what but I noticed a very high number of ads and posts that are more or less self promoting.
- blowski 3y agoHe’s the Citizen Jane of our day. Trying desperately to be loved by anybody who’ll have him.
- lacrimacida 3y agoI think he’s also swindling his followers with Dogecoin and other stuff nefarious schemes.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the label Nazi feels very ahistorical, dishonestly so. One might conclude that the author is being provocative for the sake of profitable online outrage. Labels are getting thrown around too carelessly. I’m reminded of an HN post I once saw where anti-LGBT attitudes in the Muslim world were called literally fascist, even though they often predate fascism (again, a distinct political phenomenon that appeared at a particular point in time and space) by centuries.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoA fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter. The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.
- FFP999 3y ago"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." -Mark Twain
- slowmovintarget 3y agoHow is useful to refer to attempting to find new homes in places other than Earth "nazi bullshit?"
- giraffe_lady 3y agoWhose homes? Under what conditions and decided by which institutions, under what power dynamics? When you elide all that as "find new homes" you are leaving a lot of room for work colonies, extractive exploitation, and eugenics, yes. "Is having friends a conspiracy?" well... maybe, it depends on what you do with the friends. In cases like this you need to be at least a little specific about the implementation. If this sort of straightforward rhetoric gets even a handful of people to notice that the concrete plan musk has is at least agnostic towards nazi bullshit then it was precisely useful.
- Keysh 3y agoWould it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
- eesmith 3y agoFrom the front page, "This site is called antipope due to a typing error long ago in the pre-history of the web. If you want to read about it, here's the history" linking to https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html . > Antipope acquired its name due to a drunken mistake in 1991. ... "What sitename do you want?" ... "I said, "How about autopope.uucp?" ... "Okay." Hic. Burp. And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp .. And of course, it seemed reasonable in 1996 to register antipope.org and hang it off my own server in 1997, when I finally got around to a colocation deal. > So Antipope is not a significant name; it's just a communications error. You have been warned.
- pavlov 3y agoThanks for providing context for the joke.
- eesmith 3y agoWhat makes the joke not work is that cstross is really the autopope, drunkenly mislabeled the antipope. You can clearly see he still provides pontifications. If Musk is the opposite of the autopope, what does that make him?
- FFP999 3y agoA manualpope. Same basic function as an autopope, but needs a human operator.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoAn antipope is someone trying to be pope, confusingly enough. See also; St Peter's cross.
- gary_0 3y ago> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where the zombies thing came from?" Night of the Living Dead (1968) kicked off the modern zombie trope, and that was around when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness as well.
- defrost 3y agoIf you're intent on imagining a subtext to Night of the Living Dead a movie which never mentions zombies and features the (undead) neighbours harrass a black man who is ultimately shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy then you might also want to recall it was conceived in the aftermath of the Detroit and Newark riots and released to audiences who had just seen National Guardsmen shoot antiwar protesters to death at Kent State University. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-living-dead-mere-anarchy-is-loosed https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-li... Shuffling drug addicts is one influence I have no recollection of Romero ever mentioning.
- gary_0 3y agoI'm not saying that movie in particular had that subtext. Rather, the zombie trope quickly took on a life of its own in the years after Living Dead (and split into the fantasy/cursed and scifi/infected subtropes). It's hard to say why it resonated but there are definitely some interesting parallels with other cultural trends.
- defrost 3y agoIt's an interesting film, as an Australian who came to it later (I think I first saw it in 1992 ish) it was a while before I apprecriated a whole other perspective it had for some (early case of a film with a black lead, early use of graphic horror, lead character being killed, etc). A fistful of tropes indeed :)
- photonthug 3y agoMaybe more a genre than a trope, but I'd like to see more biopunk
- euroderf 3y agoand solarpunk ! But I can more easily picture a biopunk horror film than solarpunk horror. Gimme Cronenbourgeois slime.
- starkparker 3y ago> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI mean when the mughals show up and attempt to create indentured servitude on mars we can generalize a bit. Right now it doesn't seem necessary.
- Keysh 3y agoWell, it's not as if people originally from Asia went and colonized islands all over the Pacific over the last few thousand years or anything.
- yaqubroli 3y ago…Japan?